Engineering Manager - Loancrate

What is Loancrate?

We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers (us!). Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000.

Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year.

Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We are a group of people excited to tackle the complexity of the home-lending industry. We care about collaboration, very open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building. You'll fit in well if you like diving deep quickly!

The Opportunity

Our dreams are big and we have much to build! We're looking for an Engineering Manager to own the health, output, and trajectory of one of our engineering pods — roughly 6–8 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You'll own your pod’s operating system: people, execution, delivery health, cross-functional partnership, and continuous improvement. You'll partner with a Technical Lead on architecture and technical quality, and with a Product Manager on what's worth building.

Those partnerships are the job. You are not the technical decision-maker of last resort, and you are not a proxy PM — you are the person accountable for whether the pod is healthy and whether the pod delivers. Our product runs some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in financial services, and when our software is wrong, someone's home purchase is at risk. That reality shapes how we build and how we manage.

What To Expect

On your first day, you'll ship something to production. It's a team tradition, and for managers it's also a statement of intent. We don't want EMs who lose touch with what their engineers actually do all day.

We're building an AI-native product, and we rely on AI heavily in our own engineering workflows too. We use background agents, evals, and AI-assisted development. We expect our managers to be fluent in this, not just tolerant of it. If that excites you, you'll thrive here. If it gives you pause, this probably isn't the right fit.

Your First 90 Days

• First 30 days: Weekly 1:1s established with every direct report, and a real read on each person's strengths, motivation, and growth trajectory. A working understanding of the pod's roadmap, codebase, and dependencies. A clear-eyed inventory of what's actually blocking your engineers.
• First 60 days: Your pod’s operating cadence is yours: planning, retros, and follow-through. You're catching stalled or poorly scoped projects before they slip, and you're surfacing risk to the Head of Engineering before it's discovered independently. Your PM has started treating you as a partner in prioritization.
• First 90 days: Performance expectations are explicit and understood. Any sustained performance gap on the pod is being actively addressed. New hires are ramping faster than they were before you arrived. The pod is solving most of its own problems without escalation.

Core Responsibilities

• Pod effectiveness: Own overall performance, operating cadence, remove blockers, and hold high standards alongside psychological safety.
• Execution: Be accountable for delivery, spot roadmap risks early, and intervene on stalled or poorly scoped projects.
• People management: Run weekly 1:1s, provide continuous feedback, track performance and growth, support retention, and address gaps swiftly.
• Onboarding: Own onboarding for new engineers, set up real work for day one, and keep documentation and runbooks accurate.
• Product partnership: Partner with Product Managers to challenge weak requirements, prioritize high-value problems, and represent engineering tradeoffs.
• Technical partnership: Partner with Technical Leads on architecture and technical risk while maintaining enough technical depth to be credible.
• Staffing and pod design: Recommend hiring based on real organizational needs, interview candidates, and support succession planning.
• Communication and escalation: Provide honest updates on pod health to leadership and communicate dependencies across pods proactively.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, Vite, TypeScript
• Backend: Node, Express, Docker
• API: GraphQL, Apollo
• Database: Postgres (Aurora)
• Monorepo: Turborepo, PNPM
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK/Kafka, OpenSearch), Terraform, Pulumi
• CI/CD: Buildkite (TypeScript pipeline-as-code with ephemeral environments)
• Observability: Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry

Preferred Skills & Background

• Experience managing engineers directly (ideally 5+ on a product or platform team).
• Credible engineering background and ability to evaluate design docs and PRs.
• Track record of predictable delivery and improving team processes.
• Fluency with modern AI product development and engineering workflows.
• Comfort with ambiguity and high-complexity domains like mortgage origination.
• Strong product partnership instincts and crisp written communication.
• Directness with care, operational/reliability instincts, and security awareness.

Perks & Benefits

• Robust medical coverage (100% of employee + family premiums covered)
• Vision & dental coverage
• 401(k)
• HSA / FSA
• Access to lender partner's employee loan program
• Remote-first culture
• Flexible time off